My husband said to me the other day, “You talk about being lean all the time, but your email in-box is definitely not lean!”

I have to admit, I tend to keep things around just in case I might need them down the road. I keep coupons I might use for months beyond expiration, every piece of high school and college memorabilia I've come to acquire, and of course almost every email sent to me.

According to lean methodology, too much inventory has the potential to hide problems. For example, a company with too much inventory might neglect to see that a machine on the process line is malfunctioning or that there is too much machine downtime in one area of the process.

Keeping my in-box inventory high might cause me to miss seeing and acting on an important email. So why don't I throw in the towel and just delete all of my old messages, or at least sort important messages into folders? In the name of being lean, this is what I should do, right?

However, I rely on old email messages to gather information quite frequently, and the process of sorting and deleting more than 3,000 messages just isn't a solution that adds a whole lot of value for me. In fact, sorting my email to make finding old email messages easier doesn't even seem to make sense, considering that using the client search feature quickly pulls up old email messages right when I need them.

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